About Me

Hello World!

My name is James Phillips. I’m a programmer and game designer living in Brooklyn.

I graduated from NYU in May 2014 with a BA in Computer Science, as well as minors in Game Design and Web Programming and Applications. I have experience with Objective C, Processing, Java, Matlab, HTML5, JavaScript, CSS and PHP. I currently work as an engineer for ProductionPro, a New York-based company making an iPad app for film, theater, and television.

Learning to program gives you the most amazing, flexible set of tools to create anything you can imagine. It feels wonderful to see your words change into a real, working program. The text fades away and turns into a database, a translator, a game. It’s as close to magic as I’ve ever seen. It’s Willy Wonka’s world of pure imagination. Anything you want to, do it. Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it.

But it feels even better when you use those tools to create an experience for someone else. Nothing can compare to watching someone else explore a world of your creation: seeing them stumble, get their footing, suss out the nuances and then try something you’ve never seen before. It’s marvelous.

I love programming, not for the act itself, but for the kinds of things it lets me make. I’ve worked on digital and non-digital games, and get the same kind of satisfaction from each. Which is why this site, a portfolio of my work, is about the games and similarly playful projects I’ve worked on, digital or not. You’ll find games, writing, and other projects all up in the menu bar. I hope you enjoy investigating them as much as I’ve enjoyed making them. Games leave the world a little sweeter every time someone plays them. And shouldn’t the world be a little sweeter? I think it should.

I’ve collected some of the games I’ve made and some of my writing here, but you can also find some of my code at my GitHub page here.